Doubting Mary: Early English Drama from N-Town to Shakespeare
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Doubting Mary: Early English Drama from N-Town to Shakespeare Emma Margaret Solberg Jersey City, New Jersey BA, Oxford University, 2005 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Virginia August, 2013 Table of Contents Introduction…………...................................................................................................................1 ★ The Late Medieval English Cult of the Virgin………….……………………………...6 ★ Critical History…………………………………………..……………………………...9 Chapter 1: The Virgin Whore ★ Introduction: Ave Eva……………………………………...………………………….20 ★ The Immaculate Conception………………………………...…………………………27 ★ Joseph’s Doubt………………………………...………………………………………42 ★ The First Suspect: Joseph………………………………...……………………………44 Mary’s Locked Door………………………………..………………………...52 God’s Cuckold……………………………………….……………………….55 ★ The Second, Third, and Fourth Suspects ……...……………………………………...60 ★ The Fifth Suspect ……...……………………………………………………………...69 ★ The Sixth Suspect ……...……………………………………………………………..73 The Adulteress’ Excuse………………………………..……………………..80 ★ Christ and the Adulteresses……………………………………...…………………….83 Marian Miracles…………………………………………..…………………..90 ★ Conclusion: Incarnational Theater…………………………………….………………92 Chapter 2: “Trye the Trewthe Owth” ★ Introduction: “The fool says in his heart, there is no God”…………………...………96 ★ Moments of Doubt…………………………………………………………..…..……102 ★ N-Town’s Nativity Pageant………………………………………………...……...…108 ★ N-Town’s “Trial of Mary and Joseph”…………………………………………….…120 ★ Conclusion: “Pleyinge of þe most Ernestful Werkis of God”……………………......128 Chapter 3: Mary’s Second Coming ★ Introduction: Reforming the Virgin……………………………………………..……131 ★ “Satan can change himselfe into an angell of light”…………………………….……135 ★ Mary and Joan………………………………………………………………………..138 ★ “Now heaven forfend! the holy maid with child!”…………………………………...155 ★ Conclusion: “Playing the Harlot”…………………………………………………….160 ★ Coda: Joseph’s Doubt in Renaissance Revenge Tragedy………………………………...165 Works Cited................................................................................................................................170 Solberg 1 ★ Introduction: “That Barbarous Species of Theatrical Representation called MYSTERIES”1 This dissertation concerns late medieval English theatrical trials of the Virgin and their afterlife during the Renaissance,2 focusing in particular on the N-Town plays (Cotton Vespasian V. viii), a scribal compilation of forty-two pageants dramatizing Christian history from Creation to Doomsday located by current scholarly consensus in late fifteenth or early sixteenth-century East Anglia, a hub of late medieval dramatic activity.3 It builds on recent work on the late medieval English cult of the Virgin (by Adrienne Boyarin and Gary Waller), as well as on the intersection of religion, gender, and sexuality in medieval English drama (by Gail Gibson and Theresa Coletti).4 Despite the many advancements made in medieval drama criticism over the past two decades, old misconceptions die hard (Coletti Mary Magdalene 10-12). I would like to take this 1 I take this quotation from Thomas Warton, The History of English Poetry, from the Close of the Eleventh to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century (London 1778). The complete quote is as follows: “The fashion of acting spiritual dramas, in which at first a due degree of method and decorum was preserved, was at length adopted from Constantinople by the Italians; who framed, in the depths of the Dark Ages, on this foundation, that barbarous species of theatrical representation called MYSTERIES, or sacred comedies” (2.368-9). 2 Although there are many recent articles and chapters on the Virgin in medieval English drama (by Gail Gibson, Theresa Coletti, Lisa Lampert, Emma Lipton, and Merrall Price, to name a few), there have been very few scholarly monographs on the subject: see Johannes Vriend, The Blessed Virgin Mary in the Medieval Drama of England (J. Muusses Purmerend 1928) and Elizabeth Witt, Contrary Marys in Medieval English and French Drama (Peter Lang Pub Incorporated 1995). On the Virgin Mary in Renaissance English drama, see Regina Buccola and Lisa Hopkins eds, Marian Moments in Early Modern Drama (Ashgate 2007); Ruben Espinosa, Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England (Ashgate 2011); Gary Waller, The Virgin Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern Literature and Popular Culture (CUP 2011). 3 The date 1468 is written on fol. 100v of the N-Town manuscript, yet the scribe’s handwriting suggests the early sixteenth century. Studies of the scribe’s dialect place him in East Harling in south-central Norfolk; scholars have also argued for Norwich, Bury St Edmunds, and Thetford. See Fletcher 163-7. On N-Town’s relation to East Anglian culture, see Peggy Granger, The N-Town Play: Drama and Liturgy in Medieval East Anglia (Brewer 2009). 4 See Gail Gibson, Theatre of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (UChicago 1989); Theresa Coletti, Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints: Theater, Gender, and Religion in Late Medieval England (UPenn 2004); Adrienne Boyarin, Miracles of the Virgin in Medieval England: Law and Jewishness in Marian Legends (CUP 2010); Gary Waller, The Virgin Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Literature and Popular Culture (CUP 2011). I am also indebted to the concept of character as elucidated by Elizabeth Fowler in Literary Character : The Human Figure in Early English Writing ( Cornell 2003). Solberg 2 opportunity to bust some of these pernicious and lingering myths.5 First, contrary to popular master narratives of the history of Western theater that understate the extent and influence of medieval traditions,6 “drama flourished in Western Catholic Europe for more than five hundred years and its roots go back to the very beginnings of Christianity” (Muir Biblical 1). Medieval drama is often dismissed on the grounds that it was supposedly uninfluenced by Classical traditions, an allegation that effectively renders medieval traditions illegitimate, excluded from the illustrious genealogy of Euripides and Shakespeare (Norton Drama 1.25-6). Yet scholarship long ago established firm links between medieval and Classical as well as between Renaissance and medieval theatrical traditions.7 (As is often pointed out, Shakespeare probably saw the Coventry cycle.8) Furthermore, macro-histories tend to argue that before the Reformation, the deep anti-theatricality of the Catholic Church suppressed “organized dramatic activity” (Norton Drama 1.26). Yet while scholars debate whether medieval drama existed in spite or because of Christianity (to borrow a phrase from E.K. Chambers), myriad dramatic texts and extensive records of performance prove the existence of an extremely popular and profoundly Christian late medieval English theatrical tradition, tolerated (at the very least) by the Church (1.16). Next, contrary to the notion that the medieval Church kept the Bible from the laity by banning its translation and dissemination, late medieval Biblical drama promulgated vernacular scripture in public thoroughfares all over “France and Germany, Italy, England, and the Low 5 I have used the Norton Anthology of Drama (2009) and Greenblatt’s Will in the World (2004) and The Swerve (2011) as maps of the current contours of these old misapprehensions. 6 Infamously, the nineteenth-century German Romantic August Wilhelm von Schlegel wrote that “no drama was to be found in all Europe during the Middle Ages” (Rozik 90). 7 On the influence of the Classics on medieval drama, see E.K. Chambers, Medieval Drama, 1.25-40 and Rozik 90- 128. See also Hunningher, Boggess, and Forse. On the influence of medieval English drama on Renaissance English drama, see Emrys Jones, O’Connell, and Perry and Watkins. 8 Greenblatt describes this in Will in the World: “In late May or June, in the time of long, sweetly lingering twilights, [he] could have seen one of the great annual Corpus Christi pageants” (37). The tyrant Herod seems to have made an especially big impression on Shakespeare: Hamlet complains about actors who out-Herod Herod and Falstaff mocks a bombast by calling him “Herod of Jewry” (2.1.19-21). Solberg 3 Countries” with impunity (Muir Biblical 6). Entire communities performed living Bibles made by the laity for the laity.9 For this reason, E.K. Chambers describes medieval Biblical drama as “an essentially popular thing, a ludus maintained by the people for its own inexhaustible wonder and delight” (Chambers 2.147). Biblical drama not only demonstrates the laity’s familiarity with Scripture but also their creativity. Adapting the Bible to local political urgencies, the York and N-Town plays depict Jesus as a Lollard heretic and his persecutors as bishops.10 (While the Wakefield plays, on the other hand, make the opposite choice, depicting devils in Hell as Lollards [XXX.211-4].) Respecting the close ties between Biblical drama and the Bible, I refer to New Testament criticism throughout this dissertation, especially to the work of Ulrich Luz, François Bovon, Bart Ehrman, and (most of all) Jane Schaberg.11 Biblical drama stages sophisticated theological controversies, inviting its audience to grapple with the trickiest knots in Christian intellectual history—especially, as I will go on to argue, the problem of the virgin birth. Drama brings the medieval university into the marketplace, encouraging its spectators to wrestle with Augustine on original sin and