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COPYRIGHT 2000 www.wmich.edu/compdr
Old stancher! [Pause.] You ... remain. --Hamm in Endgame(1)
After the Protestant Reformation took hold in England, many stage properties familiar from the drama of worship performed by urban trade guilds became politically and religiously suspect. While Elizabethan society debated whether theatrical representation was acceptable on the one hand or idolatrous on the other, Elizabethan authorities sought to curb the theatrical use of Catholic symbolism through legislation. Thus a letter dated 27 May 1576 from the Ecclesiastical Commissioners of York to the bailiff and burgesses of Wakefield decreed that "no Pageant be used or set furth wherin the Ma[jes]tye of God the Father, God the Sonne, or God the Holie Ghoste or the administration of either the Sacramentes of baptisme or of the Lordes Supper be counterfeyted or represented, or anythinge plaied which tende to the maintenaunce of superstition and idolatrie or which be contrarie to the lawes of god [and] or of the realme."(2) By 1580, the Corpus Christi play cycles had either withered away or been suppressed by the Elizabethan authorities, and with them vanished such formerly central properties as the eucharistic Host itself.(3)
Yet the Mass and its symbols did not fade from the awareness of early modern audiences once their overt representation was banned on the stage. The Elizabethan playwrights who wrote for a nascent commercial theater were eager to exploit the rituals of the old religion, although their aim was not necessarily the Reformist propaganda exemplified by Cromwell's aggressively polemical playwright, John Bale. While the political space for expressions of dissent was restricted, in the new economy of the sign developed by commercially-minded playwrights, radically different imaginative contracts with spectators drawn from all levels of society became necessary in order to build an audience largely made up of individual, urban ticket-buyers rather than regional communities united by civic and devotional concerns. And if the new commercial drama risked provoking the authorities by presenting religious material in verbal form, it could smuggle religious imagery and content onto the stage by appealing to the spectators' imagination and memory through gestures and physical objects.
Marvin Carlson's concept of "ghosting" offers a useful way of understanding the mechanism whereby the commercial Elizabethan drama invoked religious symbols and ideas that could no longer be directly represented on stage with impunity. Carlson reminds us that spectators bring associations from previous productions with them to the theater, and that these "ghosts" color their experience of the current performance.(5) When Elizabethan audiences saw Edward Alleyn play Christopher Marlowe's Faustus, for example, Alleyn's performance would have been "ghosted" by his previous appearances as Marlovian overreachers such as Tamburlaine and the Jew of Malta. According to Carlson:
In semiotic terms, we might say that a signifier, already bonded to a signified in the creation of a stage sign, is moved in a different context to be attached to a different signified, but when that new bonding takes place, the receiver's memory of the previous bonding remains, contaminating, or "ghosting" the new sign.(6)
One concrete example of such "ghosting" was the Elizabethan players' use of actual church vestments and properties for satiric ends. In one familiar example, Marlowe's Mephistopheles wears the robes of a Franciscan friar (and thus confirms the audience's presumed suspicion that all friars are devilish).
Another striking example, and the focus of this essay, is the device of the bloody handkerchief popularized by Thomas Kyd's spectacularly successful The Spanish Tragedy (1582-92). As it moves through the play, Kyd's bloody handkerchief invokes previous performances by bloody cloths, even as it weaves them into an original narrative. Indeed, at the play's climax the ghost in the bloody handkerchief's folds is the Host itself, the "Real Presence" of Christ's body as it was embodied in the sacrament of the eucharist and metonymically invoked by various sacred cloths on the late medieval stage. By the time of The Spanish Tragedy--set in a Catholic country loathed and feared by a great many in Kyd's audience--the Protestant Lord's Supper had replaced the Catholic Mass in the Anglican Church. The Host itself was officially understood to be a commemorative symbol and sign of Christ's spiritual presence in the sacrament rather than the transubstantiated body of Christ.(7) Meanwhile, the commercial Elizabethan playhouses filled a theatrical and spiritual void left by the suppression of the devotional Corpus Christi drama on the one hand and the rituals of the Catholic church on the other.(8)
By analyzing Kyd's subversion of a long tradition linking holy cloths and sacred blood in medieval drama, I wish to demonstrate that the bloody napkin is a ghostly palimpsest that absorbs meaning through intertextual borrowing as well as through fresh symbolic resonance. Further, I wish to argue that Kyd's appropriation of the handkerchief was not didactic, as has been argued by recent scholars of Reformation drama, but an opportunistic bid to recast the late medieval "contract of transformation" embodied by bloody cloth as an addictive "contract of sensation." But to understand Kyd's revision, we must first trace the property-cloth's origins back to the very beginning of liturgical drama.
Holy Cloths and Sacred Blood: The Medieval Heritage
He is not here, the sothe to say. --The Wakefield Play of the Resurrection
The first dramatic cloth on the English stage was the symbolic gravecloth (linteum) that provided ocular proof of Christ's resurrection at the climax of the Visitatio Sepulchri, the tenth-century Easter liturgical drama that reenacted the visit of the three Marys to Christ's tomb. In the case of the Regularis Concordia, a liturgical script prepared at Winchester by Saint Ethelwold, Bishop of Winchester, some time between 965 and 975 for Benedictine use in England, this property-cloth tangibly linked the Visitatio to three preceding ceremonies: the Adoratio, Depositio, and Elevatio. On Good Friday, a veiled cross or crucifix was gradually uncovered by two deacons before being laid on the altar and venerated by each member of the congregation in turn (Adoratio). The deacons then wrapped the cross in the linen cloth and "buried" it in an improvised "sepulchre," a part of the altar with a curtain stretched around it (Depositio). A "watch" was then posted to "guard" the tomb until the night of the Lord's resurrection; the cross was then "raised" on Easter Sunday before the congregation was admitted to Mass (Elevatio). After the Elevatio, the linen cloth was left behind on the altar for use in the drama that followed--possibly the earliest liturgical drama to be sung in English churches.(9)
According to the text of the Visitatio in the Regularis Concordia, as set down by Saint Ethelwold, the monk who represents the angel summons the three Marys to the altar by singing, "Come and see the place [where the Lord had been laid, alleluia.]" The written instructions then read:
Saying this, let him rise, and lift the veil and show them the place bare of the cross, with nothing other than the shroud in which the cross had been wrapped. Seeing which, let them set down in that same sepulchre the thuribles which they had carried, and let them take up the shroud and spread it out before the clergy; and, as if demonstrating that the Lord has risen and is not now wrapped in it, let them sing this antiphon: The Lord has risen from the sepulchre ... And let them lay the cloth upon the altar.(10)
In this liturgical drama, sung by the clergy in Latin at the end of matins on Easter morning, the linen cloth represents Christ's cerements. David Bevington notes that the ceremony is simple, "dramatic" only in the sense that it reenacts a biblical event: "the costumes are clerical, the simple hand props are ecclesiastical artifacts, and the `stage' is the choir and altar of the church."(11) Nevertheless, J. L. SWan highlights the dramatic importance of the shroud: "More than just to direct movement and gesture, Ethelwold's business with the property cloth causes it to acquire a symbolic quality and intensity. The magic cloth makes its point first when it is seen to be cast away and then when it is flourished."(12) Christ's "presence" is paradoxically demonstrated by his absence, which is symbolized by the metonymic piece of cloth.
The first substance absorbed by sacred cloth on the English stage is thus the "felt absence" of Christ's resurrected body.(13) The cloth is shown to the congregation as the culminating moment of a divine narrative known intimately by all present. It is a mnemonic device that reenforces a preexisting "contract of revelation": a belief in Christ's resurrection that is based on faith in the unseen. In a sense, the shroud is not "proof" at all. Rather, the shroud is the buffer between audience and player that signals the end of the story and the beginning of faith.
By the time of the vernacular Corpus Christi cycles in the fourteenth and early fifteenth century, which current scholarship suggests developed alongside the liturgical drama rather than evolving out of it, another, more explicitly magical cloth had appeared. Freed from the verbal constraints of the liturgy, which may have limited the expansion of the sung Latin drama, the urban play cycles enthusiastically elaborated on scripture by introducing apocryphal characters, properties, and dialogue. The Corpus Christi pageant of the Road to Calvary thus introduced the legendary figure of Veronica, who placed a cloth against Christ's face only to find it magically imprinted with Christ's features.(14) The "image" was of course prestained on the cloth, and in the Lucerne Passion play the Veronica actor repeats...
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