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COPYRIGHT 2006 Associated University Presses
SCHOLARS have long recognized that medieval concepts of reciprocal justice and divine retribution underpin the dramatic patterns of the Herod plays. (1) However, they have overlooked the evidence suggesting that this ethical design is embodied in the mothers' laments. There is also critical disagreement over the strength of the typological association between the mothers of the Slaughter plays and the Virgin Mary of the Flight, Purification, and Passion sequences. While scholars agree that the plays skillfully blend topical realism with the biblical story in portraying Herod and his knights, (2) they vary in their assessments of the mourning mothers.
There is critical disagreement over whether or not the mothers of the Herod plays are "active" or "passive" in their suffering. This issue leads directly to the problem of typology: those who see the mothers as "active" often construe the Virgin as "passive." These critical discrepancies expose tacit biases with respect to the dramatic representation of female grief, particularly the Virgin's. There appears to be an expectation that female sorrow, and especially the Virgin's, should be dramatized as restrained, picturesque, and lyrical rather than angry and vengeful. None have pursued the parallels between Mary and the mothers beyond pointing out how their association supports the typology between Christ and the Innocents, a relationship that has been thoroughly charted. (3) The evidence of the plays suggests, however, that the affinity between Mary and the mothers is meaningful in its own right.
In this essay I hope to redress this critical oversight by demonstrating the significance of the typology between the Virgin of the Flight, Purification, and Passion sequences and the mothers of the Slaughter plays. In all four cycles Mary's narrow escape with her child prefigures the plight of the mothers, just as their dilemma, in turn, foreshadows Mary's woe during the Passion. The Purification play adds the last thematic thread to the dramatic tapestry that intertwines the fates of Mary and the mothers. It underscores the tragic kinship between them by auguring both the mothers' loss of their children and Mary's inevitable loss of Jesus.
The maternal mourning of the holy women in medieval drama, as Peter Dronke shows, is rooted in the wails of anguish and songs of sorrow through which medieval women coped with the death of their loved ones throughout their own lives. (4) In these plays, the mourning Mother of God is not a mute emblem of sorrow; her dramatic power emanates from her wails, not her silence. Her laments condemn Herod, while the cries of the bereaved mothers compound her denunciation and engender his fate. Moreover, this dramatic typology conveys not simply Christ's tragic burden, but also his mother's.
To make this argument, I first examine critical resistence to reading the dramatic agency of maternal mourning in these plays. Next, I analyze writings by John Mirk, the popular late medieval English preacher, to illuminate medieval beliefs about the power of cursing and maternal mourning. After establishing this critical and historical background, I turn to a close reading of the plays in order to demonstrate the dramatic agency of maternal mourning in the medieval English Corpus Christi drama.
I
In their discussions of the Towneley Slaughter of the Innocents both David Bevington and J. W. Robinson raise the issue of typology between the Virgin of the Passion and the mothers of the Herod plays, but they reach different conclusions. Bevington begins by noting a correspondence between the mourning mothers of the Towneley Herod the Great and the lamenting Virgin of the Towneley Crucifixion. However, his observation remains inconclusive because he sees the Virgin's lament as passive and the mothers of the Herod play as active. Observing that the "the mothers of the slain children are ... vividly portrayed" in the Wakefield play, he concludes: "Although their role is similar to that of the Virgin Mary at the foot of the cross, they are not passive mourners but fiercely protective women justly accusing their oppressors of unmanliness." (5) While J. W. Robinson agrees that "each woman in turn puts up a defense" against the knights, he has no doubt that the terms of their laments are meant to "recall Mary's lamentation at the Crucifixion, thus making clear, by implication that their sons have been killed for Christ" (167). While Robinson sees the typology between Mary and the mothers, he interprets its significance only in terms of Christ.
In addition to differences of opinion concerning the strengths of the typological links between the mothers and the Virgin, scholars vary in their assessments of the conflict between the women and the knights in the different cycles. J. W. Robinson reads the Towneley and York versions of the episode as similar in mood and intent:
To his credit and, as in the York play, the Wakefield Master has not prolonged this section of the play. The lamentations are loud and forceful but brief. The struggles, although accompanied by insulting words on both sides are deadly serious and especially noticeable for the helplessness of fingernails against gleaming armor, an image similar to the image common in paintings and carvings of the Crucifixion in which a very thin and nearly naked Christ is no match for his fleshy and muscular opponents. The women squall and scratch helplessly, and lesser (and later) playwrights seized the opportunity to turn what at York, and even more so in the Towneley collection, is calculatedly horrifying into farce so that the effect is more like the domestic squabble shown on misericords, one of which, in St. Mary's church, Whalley, Lincolnshire, from the early fifteenth-century shows a warrior, his weapons abandoned, kneeling before a woman who beats him with a frying pan. (168)
In contrast, Richard Beadle and Pamela King echo Rosemary Woolf's remarks of a generation ago; they view the York cycle as unique in its tasteful representation of the event: (6)
The York dramatist on the whole avoided the grotesque effect found in other cycles, where the women confronted the soldiers with coarse invective, whilst their keening and screaming after the massacre ran the risk of becoming as much a common-place as Herod's ranting. Instead, the women are here presented in a largely lyrical and passive vein, clearly intended to prefigure the Virgin's Planctus Mariae of The Death of Christ and also to echo her tone in The Flight into Egypt. (7)
Like Woolf, who finds the representation of the mothers "surprising," and Robinson who asserts that "lesser playwrights" could not handle their material, Beadle and King implicitly dismiss the spirited encounters of the "other cycles" as artistically flawed.
These aesthetic discriminations collapse under the pressure of close reading. The distinction between "active" and "passive," moreover, proves an unreliable guide to clarifying the dramatic function of the mourning mothers within the poetics of the plays, and to ascertaining their typological relation-ship to the Virgin Mary. Beadle and King's own editorial notes appear to contradict their reading of the mothers as "largely passive." In the note to line 203, they observe that the first soldier returns a blow because the first woman has struck out at him. In the note to line 209, they point out that the soldiers' words, "These queans will quell us here," mean that the soldier is afraid the women will destroy [quell] them. Note 194 points out that the first woman curses the soldiers. As J. W. Robinson observes, the women fight back in both the Towneley and the York (169). Although the mothers lose the struggle, they attempt to defend their infants by denouncing the soldiers, as well as striking at them. In the York play the first woman curses: "Out on you, thieves, I cry" (194), (8) while the Second Woman calls them "false lurdayns [wretches]" (222). This language is no more or less coarse than the mothers' cries for vengeance in the Towneley and Digby versions. In the Towneley play the mothers call the soldiers "ffals thefe" (338), and "No man" (356). (9) In the Digby, they call them "false traitours" (301), "coward" (309), and "javelle [knave]" (345). (10) Only in the N-Town, in which there is no verbal exchange between the women and the soldiers, do the mothers not include oaths in their laments. (11)
The only play that stands out for its coarse language is the Chester Innocents, which also differs significantly in dramatic mood. Like the Digby Killing of the Children, it mingles comedy with tragedy in a carnival inversion of gender. As the First Woman beats the First Soldier with her distaff, she swears she will do so until he "both shyte and pisse!" (358). (12) Similarly, the Second Woman tells the Second Soldier: "My child shall thou not assayle. / Hit hath two hooles under the tayle; / kysse and thou may assaye" (366-68). (13) Despite their bawdy behavior, their laments do have internal typological resonances with the Virgin's. Moreover, their raucousness appears to fulfill a cathartic communal function. (14)
From this perspective, the "commonplace" nature of the women's wailing should be viewed as a strength instead of a weakness. The prevalence of maternal mourning in these plays, in all of its manifestations--from moments of lyric rapture, to howls of anguish, to comic banter--suggests its heartfelt resonance in late medieval culture. With respect to Herod it is precisely the familiar, "commonplace" quality of his cowardly braggadocio that makes him a dramatically credible and significant character. Daniel C. Boughner puts it succinctly: "Herod is a representative of that arrogant and insolent feudalism whose portrayal gives local English substance and topical import to the scriptural role." (15) I propose that the same is true of the mourning mothers. Just as the plays augment scripture, interpreting the cruel greed of Herod and his mercenary knights from a medieval English perspective, so they depart from the biblical sources in their depiction of the mothers' laments, assimilating popular practices and beliefs to the Christian story.
Matthew 2:13-18 makes no reference to a public confrontation between Herod's henchmen and the mothers of the slaughtered children, but all of the plays include such an encounter. Moreover, apart from an allusion to Jeremiah 31:15, when Rachel weeps for her children, the gospel makes no mention of lamentation, and Rachel's lament does not include oaths and cries of vengeance. (16) Yet even in the briefest renderings of the episode, in the York and the N-Town cycles, the women struggle to protect their babes as they lament. In the Chester cycle and the Digby play, the women directly confront, not only the soldiers, but Herod as well. The full ethical force of their grief impinges upon the consciousness of those who see and hear. In the Towneley play, Herod himself unbiblically dreads the mothers' mad cries. As he sends his soldiers off on their mission, he warns: "If women wax woode; / I warn you, syrs, to spede you" (314-15). These significant deviations from scripture suggest that the women's cries and curses have a dramatic coherence that requires further investigation.
II
Because public sermons and treatises, such as those published in Mirk's Festial, blend formal theology with more widespread cultural practices and ideas, they open a window into the same creative tensions that produced medieval communal theater. (17) Three of Mirk's works, two homilies from the Festial, and a treatise on cursing included in his Advice to the Clergy, help to elucidate late fifteenth-century English beliefs about the moral force of oaths in general, and of maternal mourning in particular. (18)
Mirk illustrates the power and danger of oaths in both "The Points and Articles of Cursing" and a homily written for Passion Sunday. In "The Points and Articles of Cursing," he sets forth the communal enterprise of excommunication. This serious act was accomplished by means of a formal curse, a ritual speech-act pronounced against those who committed wrongs against the clergy or the church. (19) Conducted four times a year, on the first Sunday after Michael's Feast, "Mydlenton" Sunday, the feast of the Holy Trinity, and the Sunday after Candlemass, the practice anathematizes erring parishioners "til [thorn]hei come to amendmente" (61).
Referring to the declaration of the curse as a "hydowse [thorn]ynge" (60), Mirk treats the ritual as a necessary evil, one that must be performed "reddely" (60) and without "wonde" (60) on the part of the clergy. (20) In the preliminary address, he explains to the parishioners that the priest's tongue is "goddus swerde" (61). Just as a "swerde de-partuth [thorn]e heued from [thorn]e body" (61), so the priest's curse severs a man's soul from the body of the church: "fro [ihesu cryste] and fro oure lady, & ffro alle [thorn]e cumpany of heuen" (61). The souls of those who are excommunicate, he explains, are in the hands of the "fende off helle"...
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