The dramatic conversion of Nicholas Barber in Barry Unsworth's Morality Play.(Critical essay)

A significant strand of British fiction since the 1970s has been historical, reaching, during that decade, what one major critic of twentieth-century British fiction has somewhat hysterically termed "near-epidemic proportions [...]" (Bradbury 404). Perhaps the historical trajectory in recent British fiction stems from what Jason Cowley, the recent literary editor of the New Statesman, has recently called a pervasive "loss of confidence in the fictional possibilities of contemporary England" (5). One of the leading British novelists of his generation, Barry Unsworth is also one of the great practitioners of the historical novel, having more recently written a series of elegantly styled novels dealing with the past after an early career of writing novels set in the present. Peter Kemp has even argued that "No late-twentieth-century British novelist has written of history more variously, more thought-provokingly, more engrossingly, and with more humane commitment" (367). Yet Kemp remains one of a handful of critics to even conceive of Unsworth as a British writer, much less recognize his marked achievements in the novel, despite Unsworth's having won the Booker Prize for his novel Sacred Hunger in 1992 and being short-listed for the Booker for Pascali's Island (1980) and Morality Play (1995).

Perhaps Unsworth's long residence in Scandinavia, then Italy, has created the sense that he is not British, in a limited and provincial sense of the term. The novelist Hilary Mantel, herself from northern England like Unsworth, argues that in contrast to the trans-territorial sense of nationalism she experienced during her stay in Africa in the late 1970s and early 1980s, "the English are literal-minded about borders. For obvious reasons, they do not make a territorial identification with the continent of Europe" (99). She further notes that Unsworth is a "studious, clever, but unpretentious writer," and "is one of our most intelligent commentators on cultural mythology," yet one whose novels like his Losing Nelson (1999), set in an European context, has "dared to displace the Anglocentric view, and sacrifice an English hero to our common European humanity" (103). Unsworth's personal attraction to fluidity across national boundaries accords with his novelistic concerns with dynamic characters, as many of his works chart the development of the self over an extended period of time.

Despite his relative critical neglect, Unsworth's body of work deserves our full critical attention. His historical works include Pascali's Island, which explored the period after the fall of the Ottoman Empire; Stone Virgin (1985), which investigated the intricacies of imperial Venice; and Sacred Hunger, which surveyed the horrors of the slave trade. Unsworth's transnational identity and his novels since the 1980s epitomize two seemingly contradictory trends in contemporary British fiction--its internationalization and the renascence of regionalism.

One of his regional English novels, Morality Play (1995), a tightly organized murder mystery, concerns a troupe of dramatic players who tour northern England in the fourteenth century performing morality plays for their living. After accepting a priest, Nicholas Barber, who has left his post as scribe to a wealthy patron, into their number, they enter a town that has just experienced the murder of a young boy. Because of their declining revenue gained from producing only single mystery plays, the lead player, Martin, incorporates the story of the boy's murder into the play they perform, using the stock characters of the traditional morality play in an attempt to stage his death. As the players research this atrocity, they find troubling clues that suggest the involvement of the town's wealthiest family. Staging the play then becomes a public enactment of the events of his death, with the townspeople spiritedly joining in and breaking down the traditional fourth wall of the theater. As reality increasingly intrudes upon their play, they are summoned before the wealthy nobleman de Guise and asked to perform it once more. The lead player ends up accusing him directly, but his son William actually turns out to be the guilty party. Barber's movement through the three stages of confession articulated by the Christian formalist Mikhail Bakhtin leads him to a truly confessional moment in which he escapes his self-absorption and places his full trust and faith in God. While Barber leaves the Church, he realizes his vocation inherently involves having his new "audience"--the crowds that watch him and the other players perform--search their consciences in an effort to live more contemplative and moral lives.

By playing the role of Good Counsel in the three different performances of the play that comes to be known as The Death of Thomas Wells, Barber's old self is transformed into a new one in a process analogous to the traditional morality play: innocence, fall, and regeneration. In the process of becoming a player after his fall as priest, he dies to his old self and is reborn with a new self that was latent in him all along. He thus explores and proclaims his growing faith through his new role as player much better than he did as a priest, thus giving the lie to George Garrett's claim that Unsworth rejects the seriousness and conviction of medieval Christian faith and to Richard Bernstein's argument that the novel "is not theological."

Barber's acquisition of a new self is stunningly shown through Unsworth's depiction of another three-tiered process: the old life of the troupe with Brendan in which they traveled performing only certain parts of the great medieval mystery play cycles such as the Play of Adam; the decline of these isolated performances of the mystery plays in the face of the burgeoning dominance of the medieval guilds which could stage each station of the cycle over a period of almost twenty-four hours with rolling stages; and their resurrection of an old form, the morality play, which they infuse with new life by incorporating the events surrounding the death of the boy Thomas Wells. While Barber creates a new self from his continued role playing in the Play of Adam in The Death of Thomas Wells, he and his fellow players create a new form, a hybridized version of the traditional morality play that borrows its stylized gestures and stock personified vices and virtues and combines these elements with new content--the murder of the young boy. The result on-stage is something akin to early modern drama, borrowing as it does from an older form and drawing upon contemporary situations and incidents for the plot. In another departure from the traditional morality play, the players' motives are mixed, stemming from a desire to make money and to discover the murderer rather than with the typical genre's call to repentance and forgiveness.

Unsworth thus manages to suggest the rise of a new genre of drama through another generic form--the novel--a superb historical and formal maneuver. In the process, he demonstrates how artistic form is inherently wedded to moral content, proving the truth of Iris Murdoch's claim in her 1992 work, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, that "Art, especially literature, has in the past instinctively operated as a form, the most profoundly accessible form, of moral reflection" (qtd. in Cunningham 159). But Barber's transformation and the metamorphosis of the play come with a terrible price: the forbidden knowledge about Thomas Wells's murder leads them deeper into the darkness of their own souls and the evil lurking in the castle above the village.

The very first scene of the novel offers us a glimpse into Barber's latent desire to be a performer when he watches the company of actors as they see the death of one of their own, the gifted actor Brendan. The dramatic death of this character is performative and alluring to the priest: "I saw them gather round and crouch over him in the bitter cold, then start back to give his soul passage. It was as if they played his death for me and this was a strange thing, as they did not know I watched, and I did not then know what they were" (7). Despite having observed many deaths before, Barber senses something different with Brendan's passing, something inherently theatrical that is …