Abstract
If “miraclis pleyinge” is performance according to the meanings discussed in the previous chapter, what, then, are the concepts of performance and aesthetic attitudes that characterize religious vernacular theatre and that can be reconstructed through study of the ToMP? Perhaps the most straightforward indication of the negotiation of aesthetic concepts in the tract are the objections to “miraclis pleyinge” that emanate from the performances’ divergence from painted images of the same subjects. The emphasis on the liveness of performance as opposed to the static nature of a painting is a clear example of an aesthetic concept, that is, a tenet that uniquely defines a specific artistic medium, such as one which distinguishes theatre and performance from other artistic forms. Other relevant aesthetic issues are: How does a performance relate, involve, and engage an audience? What are the means of performance that create an effective experience? What are the specific needs and characteristics of “religious theatre”? How does such theatre conceive of actor/character dialectics, especially in the distinctive case of enacting holy figures? That is, how is the very place that actors stand in in this kind of theatre regarded by their contemporaries? Identifying such concerns in the text is vital not only in order to demonstrate the very existence of an aesthetic performance discourse, but also to articulate such aesthetic attitudes, so that a poetics of religious theatre in general might emerge.
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Notes
See Pamela Sheingorn’s “The Visual Language of Drama: Principles of Composition,” Contexts for Early English Drama, ed. Marianne G. Briscoe and John C. Coldewey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 173–91.
Erick Kelemen, “Drama in Sermons: Quotation, Performativity, and Conversion in a Middle English Sermon on the Prodigal Son and in A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge” ELU 69 (2002): 9–10.
Horace, The Art of Poetry, trans. John Conington, in Theatre/Theory/ Theatre: The Major Critical Texts from Aristotle and Zeami to Soyinka and Havel, Ed. with intros. Daniel Gerould (New York: Applause, 2000), 80.
See Marvin Carlson, “Theater and Dialogism,” in Critical Theory and Performance, ed., Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1992), 313–23. He writes: “The theater, through the particularly open-ended process of performance rein-terpretation and the heteroglossia provided by the multiple voices of enactment, provides an utterance, in Bakhtin’s sense, of particular complexity” (321).
Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture, and Society in Late Medieval Writings (New York: Routledge, 1993), 38, original emphasis.
Thomas P. Campbell, “Liturgical Drama and Community Discourse,” in The Liturgy of the Medieval Church, ed. Thomas J. Heffernan and E. Ann Matter (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Western Michigan University, 2001), 625.
See Nicholas Davis, “The Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge: On Milieu and Authorship,” METh 12:2 (1990), 124–51, for a discussion of the Latin origins and meanings of “ludere” (playing) and its relation to the idea of “lying” and “illusio” as a practice “where the meaning is contrary to that suggested” (129). In this article Davis tries to establish the Wycliffite origin of the ToMP.
Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 72.
See Ralph Blasting’s “The Pageant Wagon as Iconic Site in the York Cycle,” Early Theatre 3 (2000): 127–36, for a discussion of the pragmatic uses of the street as part of the performance;
and Cami D. Agan’s “The Platea in the York and Wakefield Cycles: Avenues for Liminality and Salvation,” Studies in Philology 94 (1997): 344–67, for an analysis of how this spatial tension intensified the experience of audience participation. For a more general discussion of the socially complex use of performance space,
see for example David Wiles’s A Short History of Western Performance Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) especially Chapter 3, “Processional Space,” 63–91.
Clifford Davidson, “Nudity, the Body, and Early English Drama,” in History, Religion, and Violence: Cultural Contexts for Medieval and Renaissance English Drama (Burlington: Ashgate, Variorum, 2002), 149.
and Pamela Sheingorn and David Bevington’s “‘Alle This Was Token Domysday to Drede’: Visual Signs of Last Judgment in the Corpus Christi Cycles and in Late Gothic Art,” in Homo, Memento Finis: The Iconography of Just Judgment in Medieval Art and Drama, ed. David Bevington, (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 1985), 121–46. They write: Recapitulation, organizing principles of symmetry and antithetical contrast, the use of symbolic stage structures and scaffolding, hieratic ordering of figures, the rhetorical pairing of virtue and vice and of the generic and the particular, contrastive imagery of the idealized and the particular—all these are carefully suited to the dramaturgic and theatrical needs of the cycle play as a whole, and yet they find their counterparts in sister art forms that do not operate through speech and action, and would seem at first glance to have no need for the closure that belongs to a dramatic action told through narrative in time and space (122–3).
Ellen M. Ross, The Grief of God: Images of the Suffering Jesus in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 78.
See Lynette R. Muir, “Playing God in Medieval Europe,” in The Stage as Mirror: Civic Theatre in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Alan E. Knight (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), 25–50, for a detailed survey of costuming and conventional ways of performing Christ and God the Father, and see my analysis of “epic acting” in the next chapter.
See Pamela M. King’s The York Mystery Cycle and the Worship of the City (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006) for an analysis of the plays’ relations to the religious worship and rituals of the city of York.
For a critique of Elias’s discourse see Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Controlling Paradigms,” Anger’s Past, 238. See also Robert van Krieken, “Violence, Self-Discipline, and Modernity: Beyond the ‘Civilizing Process,’” Sociological Review 37 (1989): 193–218.
See Carol M. Meale, “‘This is a deed bok, the tother a quick’: Theatre and the Drama of Salvation in the Book of Margery Kempe,” in Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain. Essays for Felicity Riddy, Ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), 52–3; And see chapters I 11 and I 80 in The Book of Margery Kempe, trans, and ed. Lynn Staley (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2001), 18–20; 139–42.
One of the central reasons for the modern renewed interest in producing the medieval mystery plays is their communal nature. See John Marshall’s “Modern Productions of Medieval English Plays,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, ed. Richard Beadle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 290–311. See also Claire Sponsler’s Ritual Imports: Performing Medieval Drama in America for a postcolonial analysis of the communal nature of medieval theatricalities within different moments of American history. In each of her intriguing studies she examines the ways ritual, performance, and cultural memory simultaneously reinforce communal identity and resist nationalism, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).
See for example Anne Higgins, “Streets and Markets,” in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 77–92. In this essay Higgins discusses and analyzes the process and reasons for changing the route and dates of the Corpus Christi procession and play because of social and political events in York.
Margaret Rogerson, “Living History: The Modern Mystery Plays in York,” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 43 (2004): 21. Rogerson quotes Mike Tyler from his “Report by the Director,” RORD 42 (2003): 158.
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© 2011 Sharon Aronson-Lehavi
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Aronson-Lehavi, S. (2011). Concepts of Performance in A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge . In: Street Scenes. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118119_3
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