Staging disorder: charivari in the N-Town Cycle.

The N-Town cycle's "Trial of Mary and Joseph" has several problematic passages, not the least of which is the lengthy speech delivered by Den the Summoner at the beginning of the play. The general consensus among editors and critics is that the list of alliterating names called out by the Summoner is a nonsensical joke. Joseph Bryant has argued that "[w]e are not to imagine, of course, that there were thirty-four supernumeraries present to receive Den's summons. It was simply addressed to the audience of the play." (1) However, even if we accept that thirty-four actors is probably too large a crowd for the medieval stage, we need not assume that no one mounted the scaffold in response to Den's summons, or that the names are merely nonsense. Rather, I wish to argue that Den's list is carefully chosen to enumerate the members of a riding, and that some of the names were represented by people on stage. This interpretation of the Summoner's speech will also clarify several other problematic passages in the "Trial."

Before examining the Summoner's speech, we need to place "The Trial of Mary and Joseph" in its textual, literary, and cultural contexts. The play is part of the original cycle as listed in the Proclamation, and it lacks the lofty tone of the material related to the life of Mary. As in most medieval drama, the "Trial" is anachronistically set in the contemporary world, and Mary and Joseph are not so much characters living in the holy land as a couple from fifteenth-century England. As such, the play reflects the natural uncertainties that would arise from Mary's pregnancy. As a wife who has vowed chastity with her elderly husband, Mary's pregnancy is doubly suspicious: has she, in the tradition of the fabliau, been unfaithful to her aged husband; or has the couple's vow of chastity been broken, thus confirming fifteenth-century qualms over the unusual custom of chaste marriage? These two accusations are not mutually exclusive, and, as we shall see, they both highlight society's claim to police sexual conduct.

It has long been accepted that the N- Town manuscript is a collection of plays brought together from a variety of sources. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the section that deals with the life of Mary, where the sublime theology of "Mary in the Temple" stands in stark contrast to the sometimes bawdy comedy of "Joseph's Doubt." Still, the sheer volume of material devoted to the life of Mary has drawn the attention of many scholars, even though Rosemary Woolf has claimed:

 
   Consideration of Continental drama written between 1450 and 1500 shows that 
   the early life of the Virgin was included far more often than not, and 
   therefore, whilst the presence of plays on this subject in the [N-Town 
   cycle] usually arouses a flurry of excited speculation in scholars, it 
   would perhaps be more noteworthy if a mid-fifteenth-century composition 
   excluded this material. (2) 

In 1987, however, Peter Meredith demonstrated that the N-Town cycle did not, in fact, originally include all of the plays that focused on the life of Mary. In his edition of what he terms "The Mary Play" Meredith convincingly argues that the theologically loaded plays which deal with the life of the Virgin were grafted onto an existing cycle that lacked this material. (3) With the absence of the lofty tone of "The Mary Play" the N-Town cycle seems, as Eleanor Prosser put it, "unnecessarily crude" and "wholly secular." (4)

After "The Mary Play" has been removed, what remains is essentially the cycle that is described in the Proclamation, namely: "The Betrothal of Mary" (with some additions and, undoubtedly, some omissions), "Joseph's Doubt," and "The Trial of Mary and Joseph." In these plays Mary does not overshadow her doddering husband. In fact, Joseph's role is so fully developed that at times he appears more prominently than the Virgin Mother. Throughout these plays Joseph conforms to his stereotypical role as a foolish senex. Joseph and Lorrayne Baird show that "[e]very one of the Joseph plays of medieval drama conforms to this basic conventional view of Joseph as the more or less comic old man, no longer capable of the `prevy play', married to a young wife." (5) This image extends to medieval representations of Joseph in the visual arts, in which unflattering sexual innuendo is also common. (6) In the N-Town cycle, however, this image is carried to ludicrous ends. At his appearance in "The Betrothal of Mary" Joseph is already complaining about his age:

 
   Com? Za! Za! God help! Full fayn I wolde, 
   But I am so agyd and so olde 
   Pat both myn leggys gyn to folde-- 
   I am ny almost lame! (10.225-28) (7)