Abstract
Many influential studies of medieval theatre have described themselves as counteracting—either implicitly or explicitly—a conception of theatre studies as primarily the province of the textual. As early as 1944, the argument that “if [theatre] is an offspring of literature on one side of the family tree, it is no less a descendent of painting and sculpture on the other side” was put forth as a corrective to an older conception of dramatic analysis.1 Since then, a number of arguments in the field have refined our understanding of drama’s dependence as a literary genre upon its material artistic contexts.2 We might organize these arguments along a broad spectrum, from positivist reconstructions of dramatic performance as a material practice, to a more general imagining of the aesthetics of drama as a visual art form.3 The argument that follows will attempt to recuperate the role of textuality in drama by focusing on the poetic features of a medieval play. But it will do so in conjunction with an awareness of dramatic utterance as a visual and spectacular phenomenon. The N-Town Assumption of Mary, this chapter argues, creates for its audience an idealized Marian reliquary where none exists. The play uses its language and spectacle, as well as its cultural context of anchoritic spirituality, to perform its Marian reliquary.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
George Riley Kernodle, From Art to Theatre: Form and Convention in the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944), p. 2.
See, for instance, Meg Twycross and Sarah Carpenter, eds., Masks and Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor England (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002); Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi; Clifford Davidson, Drama and Art: An Introduction to the Use of Evidence from the Visual Arts for the Study of Drama (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1977); Pamela Sheingorn, “On Using Medieval Art in the Study of Medieval Drama,” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 22 (1979): 101–9; Theresa Coletti, “Devotional Iconography in the N-Town Marian Plays,” Comparative Drama 11 (1977): 22–44; Gibson, The Theater of Devotion; and Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God.
On the dangers of the positivist approach, see Richard K. Emmerson, “Eliding the ‘Medieval’: Renaissance ‘New Historicism’ and Sixteenth-Century Drama,” in The Performance of Middle English Culture: Essays on Chaucer and the Drama in Honor of Martin Stevens. Ed. James J. Paxson, Lawrence M. Clopper, and Sylvia Tomasch (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 1998), pp. 25–41.
In one sense, what Derek Pearsall calls the “workaday” nature of certain kinds of verse during this period restricts our ability to imagine too expansively the aesthetic decisions and rationales that might have gone into choosing to express something in poetry rather than prose. But by virtue of their formal features, poetic texts necessarily engage in different kinds of representational claims and strategies than prose texts do, and thus even the most mechanized forms of poetry must in some sense be subject to interpretive practices that take into account the concerns of poetics. On the status of poetry within the context of other forms of late-medieval writing, see Derek Pearsall, “Towards a Poetic of Chaucerian Narrative,” in Drama, Narrative, and Poetry in the Canterbury Tales (Toulouse, France: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2003), p. 100 [99–112]; and Elizabeth Salter, Fourteenth-Century English Poetry: Contexts and Readings (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).
Charles Bernstein, “Introduction,” in Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, ed. Charles Bernstein (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 8 [3–28].
Kathleen Ashley, “Image and Ideology: Saint Anne in Late Medieval Drama and Narrative,” in Interpreting Cultural Symbols: Saint Anne in Late Medieval Society, ed. Kathleen Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), pp. 113, 125 [111–30].
Jody Enders, Rhetoric and theOrigins ofMedievalDrama (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 9.
O.B. Hardison, Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages: Essays in the Origin and Early History of Modern Drama (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), pp. 230–31.
Ogden, Staging of Drama, p. 17.
Lawrence M. Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 3–6.
Stanton Garner, Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 216–17.
Gibson, Theater of Devotion, p. 144.
Niklaus Largier, “Scripture, Vision, Performance: Visionary Texts and Medieval Religious Drama,” in Visual Culture and the German Middle Ages, p. 212 [207–19].
Claire Sponsler, “The Culture of the Spectator: Conformity and Resistances to Medieval Performances,” Theater Journal 44 (1992): 17 [15–29].
Davidson, Drama and Art, p. 11.
Gibson, Theater of Devotion, p. 10.
On the English girdle relic, see Jocelyn Perkins, Westminster Abbey: Its Worship and Ornaments, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1938–52), p. 2:57; and Richard Firth Green, “Sir Gawain and the Sacra Cintola,” English Studies in Canada 11 (1985): 3–4 [1–11]. Green discusses late-medieval English stories about the sacra cintola in circulation: “Whether or not there was a vernacular version of the story of the sacra cintola circulating in England before the end of the thirteenth century, there were at least two by the end of the fourteenth: a stanzaic poem on the Assumption, which appears in the Auchinleck manuscript (1330–40), and another couplet version, preserved in three mss of the northern homily collection.…Finally, we might also notice that the Weavers’ Pageant (XLVI) in the York Plays gives a further version of this story” (4). Brendan Cassidy traces the English veneration of the Virgin Mary’s belt as far as 1610 in “A Relic, Some Pictures, and the Mothers of Florence,” Gesta 30.2 (1991): 97 [91–99].
Gabriela Signori, “La bienheureuse polysémie Miracles et pèlerinages à la Vierge: pouvoir thaumaturgique et modèles pastoraux (Xe-XIIe siècles),” in Marie: le culte de la Vierge dans la société médiévale, ed. Dominique Iogna-Prat, Éric Palazzo, Daniel Russo (Paris: Beauchesne, 1996), p. 593 [591–617].
Hilda Graef, Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion (New York: Sheed
and Ward, 1963), pp. 138–39. 20. Éric Palazzo, “Marie et l’élaboration d’un espace ecclésial au haut Moyen Âge,” in Marie: le culte de la Vierge, p. 322 [313–25].
Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1976), pp. 291–92.
Gibson, Theater of Devotion, pp. 139–43.
Donald Duclow, “The Virgin’s ‘Good Death,”’ Fifteenth-Century Studies 21 (1994): 61 [55–86].
Duclow, “Good Death,” 61.
Duclow, “Good Death,” 63.
Donna Spivey Ellington, From Sacred Body to Angelic Soul: Understanding Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2001), p. 81.
Duclow, “Good Death,” 60.
Stephen J. Shoemaker, “‘Let Us Go and Burn Her Body’: The Image of the Jews in the Early Dormition Traditions,” Church History 68.4 (1999): 802–4 [775–823].
Shoemaker, “Let Us Go,” 803.
Shoemaker, “Let Us Go,” 802–3.
Belting, Likeness and Presence, p. 302.
Beckwith, Signifying God, p. 88. The Corpus Christi cycle, as Leah Sinanoglou has argued, deals with the issue of Christ’s body through its liturgical associations, implicating itselfin the bodily sacrifice of the Mass (Sinanoglou, “The Christ Child as Sacrifice: A Medieval Tradition and the Corpus Christi Plays,” Speculum 48.3 [1973]: 500–502 [491–509]).
Gibson, Theater of Devotion, p. 1, Chaps. 1 and 6.
Gibson, Theater of Devotion, pp. 137, 6.
Anthropological discourses have traditionally understood theatrical performance as containing the potential to bring realities into being. See, for instance, Clifford Geertz’s description of ritual and “metaphysical theatre”: “theatre designed to present an ontology and, by presenting it, to make it happen—make it actual.” In Geertz, Negara: The Theater State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 104. Gordon Kipling brings this concept into a late-medieval context in his examination of the effects of civic triumphs. See Kipling, Enter the King: Theatre, Liturgy, and Ritual in the Medieval Civic Triumph (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 46–47.
Patrice Pavis, “From Text to Performance,” in Performing Texts, pp. 90–93 [86–100]. See also Stanton Garner’s characterization of mise-en-scène as an element of theatrical language that dynamically competes with reality: “In the theater, the mise-en-scène of language can exert such a powerful phenomenal impression that it will compete with or even eclipse the actuality of the visual present.” Garner, Bodied Spaces, p. 141.
Stephen Spector, ed., The Assumption of Mary, in The N-Town Play: Cotton MS Vespasian D.8, Early English Text Society s.s. 11–12 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 11:390, 11. 83–85. All subsequent play citations are from this edition; line numbers will appear in the text.
Ann Eljenholm Nichols, “The Hierosphthitic Topos, or the Fate of Fergus: Notes on the N-Town Assumption,” Comparative Drama 25.1 (1991): 37 [29–41].
Shoemaker, “Let Us Go,” 801–2.
Victor I. Scherb, Staging Faith: East Anglian Drama in the Middle Ages (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001), p. 38.
Clifford Davidson has noted that the image of the Virgin Mary with candles appears in several forms of devotional art and ceremony in the late Middle Ages. Examples include a servant of Mary’s holding a candle in stained glass windows at Fairford and Great Malvern; an alabaster of Mary and other figures carrying candles; and the Purification feast day in February, Candlemas (Drama and Art, p. 114).
Coletti, “Devotional Iconography,” 26.
Gibson, Theater of Devotion, p. 174.
Jacobus de Voragine, “The Assumption of the Virgin,” in TheGoldenLegend, ed. and trans. William Granger Ryan, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 2:77–97.
On the artifact metaphors used to describe Mary in this play and their casting of Mary as an image-artifact, see Matthew Kinservik, “The Struggle over Mary’s Body: Theological and Dramatic Resolution in the N-Town Assumption Play,” JEGP 95.2 (1996): 190–204.
Sylvia Tomasch, “Breaking the Frame: Medieval Art and Drama,” in Early Drama to 1600, ed. Albert H. Tricomi (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1987), p. 87 [81–93].
Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: It’s Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 4. Coletti, “Devotional Iconography,” 38; see the plate she reproduces of the funeral of the Virgin (Fouquet). On the development of Mary as a mediating figure, see also Pietre Sevret, “Le Personnage de la Vierge dans les Mystères,” in Imagines Mariae: représentations du personnage de la Vierge dans la poésie, le théâtre, et l’éloquence entre le XIIe et le XVI sieclès. Ed. Christian Mouchel et al. (Lyon, France: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1999), p. 97.
Coletti, “Devotional Iconography,” 38–39.
J.A. Tasioulas, “Between Doctrine and Domesticity: The Portrayal of Mary in the N-Town Plays,” in MedievalWomen inTheirCommunities, ed. Diane Watt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), p. 235 [222–45]. See also J. Vriend, TheBlessedVirginMary in theMedievalDrama ofEngland (Purmerend, Holland: J. Muisse, 1928), p. 48.
Nicholas Watson, “The Methods and Objectives of Thirteenth-Century Anchoritic Devotion,” in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 1987), p. 138 [132–53].
Watson, “Methods and Objectives,” in Medieval Mystical Tradition, p. 140.
Christopher Cannon, “Enclosure,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing, ed. Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 113–14 [109–23].
Sarah Beckwith, “Passionate Regulation: Enclosure, Ascesis, and the Feminist Imaginary,” South Atlantic Quarterly 93.4 (1995): 808 [803–24].
Beckwith, “Passionate Regulation,” 811.
Sharon Elkins, Holy Women of Twelfth-Century England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), p. 151.
Elizabeth A. Robertson, Early English Devotional Prose and the Female Audience (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), p. 59.
Robertson, Devotional Prose, pp. 49–57.
William Fitzhenry, “The N-Town Plays and the Politics of Metatheater,” Studies in Philology 100.1 (2003): 23 [22–43]. For Fitzhenry, this performed introspection mainly involves political questions concerning the nature of image worship within the context of Lollard debate. See also Kathleen Ashley’s argument about the social self-reflexivity apparent in the York Cycle plays in Ashley, “Sponsorship, Reflexivity, and Resistance: Cultural Readings of the York Cycle Plays,” in The Performance of Middle English Culture, p. 9 [9–24].
Jacobus de Voragine, “The Assumption of the Virgin,” in TheGoldenLegend, p. 2: 90.
Ashley, “Image and Ideology,” in Interpreting Cultural Symbols, p. 115.
Rosemary Woolf, The English Mystery Plays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), p. 287.
See Janette Dillon, Language and Stage in Medieval and Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 31–38; and Zumthor, Toward a Medieval Poetics, p. 360. Dillon sees the insertion of Latin dialogue as a means of exalting the material and also emphasizing the fluctuation in which these plays engage between the audience’s lived experience and a spiritual world beyond this one. Zumthor uses this characterization of medieval dramatic verse to make the case that medieval theatre more than modern required “an absolute predominance of extralinguistic factors.”
See, for instance, Caroline Walker Bynum, Resurrection; Brown, Cult of the Saints; and Patrick Geary, Furta Sacra.
Cited in Frantisek Deak, “Structuralism in Theatre: The Prague School Contribution,” The Drama Review 20.4 (1976): 88 [83–94].
Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 8.
Elam, Semiotics, p. 9.
Bert O. States, “The Phenomenological Attitude,” in Critical Theory and Performance, ed. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), pp. 375–78 [369–79]. For a helpful overview of some of these terms of performance theory in their specific interactions with the traditions of late-medieval drama, see Beckwith, Signifying God, pp. 62–69.
W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 43; quoted in Scherb, Staging Faith, p. 48.
As Pamela M. King argues, “What the use of space in theatre depends upon and what the audience responds to is…a series of figurally inspired signals.” King, “Spatial Semantics and the Medieval Theatre,” in The Theatrical Space, Themes in Drama 9 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 47 [45–58].
Green, “Sir Gawain and the Sacra Cintola,” 7.
Perkins, Westminster Abbey, pp. 2:49–50. See also Gibson’s description of the decorative art at Holy Trinity Church. Long Melford, and the ways that it weaves together inscriptions of Lydgate’s verse (with the command “Emprente thes thynges in thyn inward thought”) with images of the Virgin Mary and Christ (Theater of Devotion, pp. 87–90).
In discussing the Assumption within the context of the rest of the cycle, however, it is important to remember that the text of the N-Town Assumption play was copied as a separate booklet by an unknown scribe and then inserted into the main text of the N-Town manuscript, which was written down by another scribe. Thus its relationship to the rest of the cycle is somewhat unclear and contested, and it is also not included in the banns for the play. See Alan J. Fletcher, “The N-Town Plays,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, ed. Richard Beadle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 164, 171 [163–88].
Gibson, Theater of Devotion, p. 14.
Copyright information
© 2008 Seeta Chaganti
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Chaganti, S. (2008). The N-Town Assumption’s Impossible Reliquary. In: The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230615380_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230615380_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-37245-4
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-61538-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)