During the 12th and 13th centuries, serious theater was gradually moving out of the church, into the street. One of the transitional works is the Fleury Playbook, whose plays are in Latin, so they seem more likely to have still been produced inside the church. The book was bound around 1520, and it was found in the Abbey St. Benôit de Fleury, on the Loire River in central France. There are a few odd details about this book. First, it’s unusual to find books from this period that contain only one genre. Binding a book was a matter of convenience and use, and it was done locally, not at some central publisher, so it was common to bind some saints’ lives, sermons, and plays together without the modern sense that “the reader wants to find all of one type of thing inside the binding.” This book, however, contains only plays. The collection was probably put together by someone, perhaps students, who were interested in theater per se.
Also, it’s found in central France but its works seem to come from other places, and one important clue comes from the curious state of medieval music during the 1200s. Like Adam de la Halle’s secular play “Robin et Marion,” these religious plays used music. It took Europe a long time to come to a standard method of musical notation. Place dots or squares in ascending or descending order to indicate melody was pretty universal. But the hard part was to indicate duration of a note. The eventual solution was the time signature, with measures and stems/flags to show what fraction of the measure each note occupied. But during the 12th and 13th centuries, notation systems were personal or local. And the Fleury Playbook’s notation methods include systems from other regions, like Aquitaine.
The collection includes one Bible story that isn’t found elsewhere in the Latin liturgy plays: the Conversion of St. Paul. It’s in Latin verse, so probably only appreciated by monks; but its staging is interesting enough to keep a secular audience engaged. The staging envisioned Jerusalem on one side, Damascus on the other, with the in-between space designated as the house of Ananias, represented by a bed. In the story, yeshiva student Saul goes from Jerusalem to Damascus to arrest Jewish Christians, but on the road, he is struck blind by a light, with a vision of Jesus. Ananias is a Jewish Christian in Damascus, and to his consternation, he hears God telling him to go find Saul and bring him home. Although he is afraid to obey, he finds Saul, and of course he discovers not a powerful man but a blind one, probably abandoned by his traveling companions. At the home of Ananias, Saul is healed of his blindness. Later, the Damascus stage has Saul let down the wall in a basket on a rope, which the stage directions clearly expect to be carried out literally.
This brings us to a general consideration of the place of Jews in these plays. The stories include five with Jesus, the conversion of St. Paul, and four miracles of St. Nicholas. The stories from Jesus’ life begin with the Magi, Herod, and the Slaughter of the Innocents (always a favorite with medieval audiences). they include later his raising of Lazarus, a play called The Visit to the Sepulcher in which the empty tomb is discovered, and a dramatization of Jesus’s appearing to some disciples as a pilgrim on the road to the village of Emmaus. All of these stories involve Jews: in fact apart from the Magi, all of the characters are Jewish. But they’re divided into good and bad Jews: Jews who are on Jesus’s side, and Jews who are against Jesus.
The Jews who are against Jesus are characterized chiefly as envious and angry to the point of rage and murder. Christian audiences are to identify with the Jews who are for Jesus, who are honorary Christians, like Peter, John, Lazarus, Mary, and the children of Bethlehem. While the actual disciples had doubts about whether Jesus could really have risen from the dead, the disciples in these plays have no doubts. All doubts are shifted to Jews. Most oddly, this is true even for the Emmaus story. In the actual story in Luke, the men who are walking from one village to another are aware that there are reports of Jesus’s resurrection, but they find it baffling until Jesus himself, in disguise, explains it. But in the medieval play, the disciples are perfectly confident that Jesus has risen. Any doubts that exist are reported as belonging to the Jewish priests and their milieu.
Even more oddly, in the Slaughter of the Innocents play, the children of Bethlehem (played by choir boys) and “Rachel weeping for her children” also speak as Christians. The children form a procession through the church, singing a hymn about the future Sacrifice of the Lamb. When the (Jewish) soldiers come to kill them, they sing a hymn, “Hail Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world!” My source, disappointingly, does not tell us how the deaths were represented: wooden swords, choir boys falling down? When Rachel comes on stage, weeping for her children, she passed from the actual children there to her lost son Joseph, to her future lost son Jesus. She closes with an antiphon sung in the Good Friday liturgy.
Even one of the St. Nicholas plays involves a Jew, who for some reason is venerating an image of St. Nicholas. But strangest of all, when Jesus appears at the end of Visit to the Sepulcher, the stage notes direct for him to be wearing phylacteries bound on his forehead (“filacteria preciosa in capite”). Who would have looked to the medieval period to find a risen Christ in tefillin?
Jews posed a serious challenge to the medieval church. They were the source of Christian-accepted Scriptures, and all of the main characters in the Christian stories were Jews. And yet they also represented the outsiders, the doubters, the skeptics and mockers. The solution as presented in this play collection was to adopt the named characters as Christians and then set up “the Jews” as the opposition. They functioned in medieval drama much as the Mafia functions in Hollywood movies. Need a villain? Jew. It’s illuminating to realize to what extent their theater may have been denigrating Jews in the background all through the period.
sources:
“Jews in the Fleury Playbook,” by Theresa Tinkle. Comparative Drama, Spring 2004.
The Medieval French Drama. Grace Frank. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960.