The Sacrifice of Isaac in Medieval English Drama.

The absence of staged tragedy in the Middle Ages is a commonplace of theatrical history. However, there was no lack in the late medieval period of a vernacular drama that specialized in pain, suffering, and that deeper sort of mental hurt that usually is classified under the term Angst. These qualities had been far less noticeable in the liturgical drama, though such twelfth-century plays as the Fleury Lazarus and Ordo Rachelis or the Beauvais Ludus Danielis(1) did dramatize moments of severe anxiety. In its emotional structure, the music-drama of the Church with its beautifully stylized presentation was intended for production indoors in nave and choir and hence differs greatly from the more realistic and often violent scenes in the mainly outdoor vernacular plays which were designed to capture the attention of ordinary people. These vernacular plays, whether dramatizing a saint's martyrdom or the Passion of Christ, were capable of the same kinds of sensationalism and intense audience response that can be traced in secularized form in the great Renaissance tragedies of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.(2)

There is nothing inherently bland about these early vernacular plays, which have been proven to be vibrantly stageworthy in modern production when not subverted by either excessive piety or fashionable antagonism to religion.(3) Developing in the small cities and towns of pre-industrial and pre-Reformation England, these were in the main civic plays that were produced for both spiritual and financial gain by amateur actors of the community. Shielded from a tragic view of history by an essentially optimistic religious belief, the producers and performers were not isolated from violence, which nevertheless their communities worked diligently to overcome, sometimes, as in the application of cruelty in the punishment and execution of criminals--for example, in drawing and quartering, and in exposing their decapitated heads in public places--with methods that were themselves violent. It is in this context that the sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham, one of the most popular of the Old Testament stories to appear on the late medieval stage, will need to be understood.

Narratives such as the story of the sacrifice of Isaac may not at first impress us as wildly violent and disturbing on account of their familiarity. In the version told by the authors of the Genesis account, Isaac is the miraculous child of aged parents.(4) Much loved, he nevertheless is to be given up in a sacrificial act to be performed by his father on Mount Moriah. The act of sacrifice has been commanded by God himself, and Abraham will do as he has been told. In Genesis Abraham is given the ordeal as a test of his obedience. Obedience is also at the core of medieval accounts and explains the presence of Abraham's sacrifice as the subject of the initial illustration at the beginning of the tenth- or eleventh-century manuscript containing the Psychomachia of Prudentius that is now British Library, MS. Cotton Cleopatra C.VIII.(5) In the Middle English Cursor Mundi the Lord merely orders, in a single sentence, that "I will ??ou offer [Isaac] to me" (line 3130), and Abraham acquiesces with hardly any qualms: "Blythly, lauerd, ??ou me him gaue, / Gode skill es ??at ??ou him haue" (3131-32). Abraham is utterly acquiescent; his will is entirely subsumed by God's inscrutable will.

"Figures and their fulfillment," V. A. Kolve has argued, establish the "formal shape" of the English play cycles that treat Old Testament material (99). Careful attention to the iconography and the structure of individual plays will qualify this view somewhat, but unquestionably the choice of episodes following the Creation and Fall does result in the presentation of characters and the dramatization of events that look forward to their fulfillment in the life, suffering, and resurrection of Christ. The selection of the Abraham and Isaac story is a primary exhibit, for it demonstrates how what might be regarded as a difficult and even outrageous lesson in obedience had received widespread attention and eventually became rich material for the stage.(6)

The significance of the sacrifice of Isaac as foreshadowing Christ's act of immolation apparently may be traced to the New Testament itself. For example, Romans 8.32-- "He ... spared not even his own Son"--seems to echo the angel's words to Abraham in Genesis 22.12. Jean Danielou describes how the Church Fathers developed the story as a foreshadowing of the sacrifice on the cross (115-30). Their work was thus instrumental in bringing the Abraham and Isaac story into the consciousness of Christian Europe in the Middle Ages, and it will be seen that the invoking of typology in the interpretation of the event was as much alive in the fifteenth century as it had been in the Patristic period.(7) In the Sarum liturgy for Quinquagesima Isaac is specifically identified as a type of Christ (Breuiarium, pt. 1, fol. lxxxv). This hermeneutic method was capable of enriching a story so long as it did not become a mechanism for denying its literal meaning by resolving it into a mere abstraction.

The Middle English text of the Speculum Humanae Salvationis specifically draws out the typological meaning of the event: "In Ysaac, Abraham son, hadde prefiguracioune: / For Ysaac on his awen shuldres wodde mekely bare & brought/ Be whilk his fadere to Godde ??at tyme hym sacrifie thoght" (lines 2450-51), and so Christ had carried the wood of the cross at his Crucifixion. Further, as ultimately a sheep was substituted for Isaac, so Christ has been substituted "for vs alle" (2458). Like Isaac, Christ would willingly in obedience offer himself up to be sacrificed. While earlier manuscripts of the Speculum such as Pierpont Morgan Library MS. M.766 show Isaac carrying the wood for his sacrifice as Christ carried his cross on the way to his Crucifixion, the illustration in a typical later block-book Speculum shows instead the crucial near-death scene, which is rescued from apparent tragedy by the appearance of an angel who comes down to prevent the father from beheading his son (Wilson and Wilson 47, 184). The Biblia Pauperum makes the correspondence even more clear: Isaac carrying the wood and following his father, who has a falchion at his side and is holding a lighted torch, foreshadows Christ with his cross on his shoulder in the adjoining panel; the angel arresting the arm of Isaac's father in turn foreshadows the Crucifixion event, which is to be understood ultimately as a rescue from death (Henry 93, 95-96, 98).(8) But even with the typological pattern in mind it is hard not to imagine the scene that might have presented itself if the angel had been delayed even for one moment: the son, whom Abraham valued more than anything else in the world, would have been sacrificed in unreasoning response to a sadistic command from on high. It is a terrible thought. Further, it is a thought that underlies the dramatic presentations of the story on the English stage and is in large measure responsible for their effectiveness both in the Middle Ages and in modern revivals.

A connection between God's will, sacrifice, and the death of a family member also is implicit in another well-known account in Genesis that was taken up by the vernacular dramatists. Paradoxically, in the story of Cain and Abel the sacrifices of the two brothers are in response too to the divine command, and here the sacrificial act does in fact lead, indirectly, to the shedding of the blood of Adam's son Abel. In Genesis, the account of God's choice of Abel over Cain, attributed to the writer known as the Yahwist (J), had no basis except in his preference for the one over the other.(9) God thus was exercising his will in making his choice, and his will seems not to have been based on any principles that could be deciphered by the humans involved in the sacrifices. Medieval commentators, following the statement in 1 John 3.12 that Cain's "works were wicked: and his brother's just," would, however, interpret God's choice as consistent with reason. The Towneley Mactacio Abel is a demonstration of the rule that to sacrifice of one's first fruits with a willing heart is necessary if one is to retain the good will of the jealous God who has made all things of nought.(10) To sacrifice stingily or to present an inferior offering is indeed hazardous and will result in God's approbation. But what happens when God, as in the story of Abraham, demands human sacrifice? In the Genesis account God's will, then, seems to be arbitrary and amoral, differing from the law which he will give in the Ten Commandments delivered to Moses on another mount, Sinai. For Cain the killing of Abel leads to God's curse and a mark which will set him off from the community of men forever. On the other hand, Abraham's guilt in intending to kill his son is set aside because it is not executed. But, in line with God's apparent will, he has been willing to do the deed, and Isaac has become an accomplice since he has been willing to surrender his life to the will of an inscrutable God.(11)