All Things Medieval

“Noah and the Flood” was a good dramatic story with exciting stage effects, and it was also an image of God saving some of the world from sin, pointing to Christ, so it was a core part of the Mystery Cycle. In York, it was split into two parts: the Building of the Ark, and the Flood. The Ship-Builders Guild, of course, built the Ark, while the Fishers and Mariners put on the Flood. The Fishers appear to have had the main franchise, with the Mariners choosing whether to just chip in money, or to be personally involved. I have to wonder if the Ship-Builders cooperated with these two guilds so that the “ship” they had assembled in the previous play might be used as the stage in this one. But that might be too much to ask, since the stage for the Flood play needed things that might have been too hard to build up and take down 17 times for each performance.

The actors in the Flood were Noah and his three sons, one daughter, and his wife. One scholar notes that women had a large share in the craft of fishing, wondering if this was a reason why Noah’s Wife was given such a large role. The wife was probably played by a man, but her portrayal in York’s production was fuller and more human, and we can wonder whether an actual woman chipped in on the writing.

The play’s subject matter was solemn, but any possibility for profane comedy was exploitable too. In this case, it was a prime moment for sitcom quarreling. Noah tells his son to go fetch his mother. It’s time to embark, for the water is rising. But the Wife isn’t ready to go. Apparently, this quarrel had become a popular folk feature of the Bible story, mentioned also in Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale.” At first, the Wife tells her son she’s not going anywhere, but she comes along just to find out what all this means. Noah welcomes her, but she isn’t ready to stay. She wants to go back and pack up her household gear, then she wants to go find her friends and cousins. Noah won’t let her, saying it’s too late. When she scolds and even slaps him for not telling her sooner that it was the final day, he points out that he’s been building this ship for about a hundred years. Noah and his wife are playing Punch and Judy; some versions may have had her carried bodily onto the boat by her sons.

I wonder if the action began on the street, with Noah looking down from the pageant wagon’s platform. The Wife may have been pushed and shoved up a ladder onto the “ship,” then a gate closed behind her. This play opens a lot of questions about special staging effects. With later Renaissance-era stages that weren’t on wagons, they used water tanks. The ship’s prow may have stood in a tub of water in those cases. With a wagon-stage, that doesn’t seem likely, but the backstage area of the wagon might have been equipped with some buckets of water to drop as rain, splashing anyone standing nearby. In some productions, the animals may have been painted onto the sides of the “ship,” or they may have been represented by large pictures—or just assumed, since they were below decks. In this version, the animals are not mentioned by name, so it’s likely they were just assumed.

The time on board goes by quickly, with some lines about taking care of the animals. The sons and daughter have a few lines stating how sick of the ship they have become, with time passing. How was the time shown? Did the sons and daughter come and go with buckets, acting out daily tasks? Did the stage have the means to suggest changes in weather, or day and night? Or did the lines themselves suffice to mark the time?

Finally it’s time to send out a bird, and Noah duly sends first a raven, then a dove. And here is an interesting twist, apparently a medieval legend explaining why the raven is black. Noah’s raven is white, but he’s both cunning and mean (“crabbed”). He understands his task, but when he finds some drowned animals that he, a carrion-bird, can eat, he stays away. What good would a lot of drowned animals do Noah and his family? None. Since the raven did not care, the legend says that he became black. The dove, though, is faithful to bring back to Noah evidence of plants growing on dry land.

We have to wonder if real birds were used, but it seems unlikely since the play had to be performed up to 17 times in the day. It’s more likely that bird models swung offstage on a rope that hung from one high crane arm. And one more effect was needed: the rainbow. A painted rainbow must have appeared, hung in the “sky,” which again suggests a crane.

Noah’s Flood is a good exemplar of the way the mystery plays preserved medieval Yorkshire dialect for us. York is just south of Scotland, and their Anglo-Saxon dialect developed in some similar ways. It’s also part of the Danelaw, the land created by an 886 treaty between King Alfred of Wessex and Guthrum, leader of the invading Vikings. We see a lot of unusual words in the play, words that aren’t in use in modern English. Some were generally medieval and some suggest a Danish-speaking layer. Most of them overlap with Scots dialect.

When Noah’s family understands something, they “witte” it, with past tense “watte.” when they know it, they “kenne” it. Something done with joy is done with “wynne.” And when someone doesn’t make sense, they’re asked, “art thou wood?” Wood meant crazy, and it seems to have been general in medieval English.

Noah intends to “flitte,” that is, to flee, to depart from here on the Ark, in order not to “spille,” that is, to be killed. He won’t go alone, that is, “sen.” He wants his wife to come, but “sho” does not agree. I don’t know if “sen” and the pronunciation “sho” rather than “she” were just Northern Scots-like words, but I am guessing they were. “Sen” is still used in Yorkshire, with “thissen” for “thyself.”

Noah and his family answer “Ya” for “yes,” which suggests Danish influence. So does the spelling for the parents, “fadir” and “modir.” As in Norwegian, their children are “barnes,” but this is also common in Scots today. When Noah’s son tells his mother that she must come, he says she “bus wende.” The Northern dialects used words similar to “be,” such as “bain’t” for “isn’t,” so I assume this “bus” is some form of “must.” Of course, we see also the present tense “wend,” a word that we use only in its past, “went,” having adopted “go” instead of “wend.”

I was particularly interested in two words I hadn’t seen before. Noah says his father Lamech is worth mentioning, or “likes to neven.” Neven was a northern variant of the Anglo-Saxon verb nemnian, which became in southern dialects our word “name.” And he tells us that Lamech prayed “with stabill steven,” meaning with a trustworthy (stable) word or promise, “steven.” In modern Scots, steven seems to mean a loud cry, or perhaps also a promise.

Finally, I was charmed to see that “Armenia” comes out in York’s Middle English as “Hermony.” Noah says, “I se here certaynely the hillis of Hermony.” Since “harmony” means peace, I hadn’t ever considered that Harmony, Pennsylvania could be named for Armenia.

We have only a fragment of York’s Cain and Abel play; the guild duly submitted its script for the registry, but several pages in the middle were lost, so we have only the beginning and the end. It probably followed the same pattern as another “Cain and Abel” play, that of Wakefield, also in Yorkshire. The Wakefield text I have has been modernized by John Glassner and appears in his Medieval and Tudor Drama book.

The story of Abel’s murder at Cain’s hands would have been another popular medieval one. In a culture that saw dogfighting and bull-baiting as wholesome sports, that allowed little boys to stone sparrows to death on St. Stephen’s Day, depicting torture or murder was just fine, as long as a moral lesson came out of it. The stage production notes in one medieval “Cain and Abel” suggested that Abel’s tunic should conceal a thin-walled pottery flask that Cain could shatter in striking him, which sounds to me like the use of fake stage blood.

And while it wasn’t acceptable to have fun at the expense of noble or saintly people, sinners or common folk were fair game. We start to see in Wakefield’s “Cain” the use of a “clown” as it’s often called when Shakespeare has one: a peasant farmer or city laborer with rough language and a bad attitude, always looking to dodge work or sass his boss. Cain has a hired-help farm boy, just to increase the comic potential. In Wakefield’s “Cain,” the hired-help gets the opening lines, “Here come I, a merry lad,” while exhorting the audience to be quiet when his master comes. In fact, whoever keeps talking, he says, may “blow my black hole both behind and before till his teeth bleed!” And so Cain’s lad rings in the first butt joke of the scene.

Abel convinces Cain to tithe his grain with much earnest arguing, while Cain slaps his hired lad, cracks more butt jokes, and swears by the devil. He greets Abel with “kiss my arse” and “kiss the devil’s bum,” and announces that God has always been his foe, pointing to his poor harvests. But when they arrive at the place of sacrifice, the slapstick really begins.

Abel’s sacrifice is soon burnt, and I really think the wagon stage must have had an iron pan with a real fire struck up in it, for the talk on stage is about the fire burning bright and clean—whereas when Cain gets around to setting fire to his sacrifice, it smokes and goes out. But before Cain lights his fire, he spends a long time counting out how many sheaves of grain he will put on the altar. He mutters to the side, swearing he’ll keep the best for himself, and he counts very grudgingly, taking up most of scene getting from two to twenty. He puts them down, pulls them back; he counts with his eyes closed (no fault to him if he misses some, right?), he sifts through his sheaf to find the skinniest stalks. Farm humor, to be sure, and probably played in a very comic way. And the whole time, he’s swearing by the devil, cursing his brother, and finally saying “in the devil’s name” when he lights it.

Nobody in the audience should be surprised when he’s such a mean cur that he knocks Abel out with an old jawbone lying on the stage ground. We’ve had ample warning that he’s very, very bad. Cain then turns to address the audience; medieval theater didn’t hesitate to break the fourth wall, and productions often used the audience and its spaces as part of the set. “And if any of you think I did amiss, I shall amend it worse!” he cries, threatening them. God comes to condemn Cain, and then his tone changes to be a little less defiant.

But before the play has a chance to become moralizing or dull, Cain calls back his hired lad. “Hide the body!” he commands. The boy is horrified, and then begins a line of patter straight out of Vaudeville. Cain is making a speech about how the boy will always go before him, crying “Oyez! (hear ye)” and claiming the king’s protection. But the boy is mugging to the audience, punctuating each line with his own rhyming parody about what’s for supper.

Cain: “Oyez! Oyez! Oy!”
Boy: Brewes (soup), brewes, to thy boy!
Cain inventing the king’s safe-passage letter: “I command you in the King’s name—”
Boy: And in my master’s, false Cain!
Cain: “That no man them may fault or blame—”
Boy: Yea! Cold roast is at my master’s hame [home]!

In the end, the boy climbs a tree to get away, before Cain dismisses him and prepares to exit, saying, “Fare well less, and fare well more, for now and evermore I will go to hide!”

When York began to stage the Corpus Christi plays again in 2006, they faced the original problems of the medieval designers: how do you put the universe on a wagon? Specifically, how do you make the wagon’s base stable and heavy enough not to blow over in the wind, while keeping it narrow enough to maneuver medieval streets and gates? While portraying Heaven, Earth, and Hell?

The York cycle divided Creation into three plays: the creation of the angels and the fall of Lucifer; the creation of the earth and its plants and animals; the creation of Adam and Eve. God’s prohibiting the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was in a fourth play, and their fall into sin by eating the fruit was in a fifth. I wonder whether each play had its own wagon, or whether some wagons may have been shared: there seems no good reason why the two plays with the Tree could not be on the same stage. But the reason might have been civic pride, so they may have had five separate wagons for these parts of the stories.

“The Fall of Lucifer” was the dramatic opening of the cycle. It opened with God in heaven speaking as he created angels and named Lucifer their chief. The actor playing God wore a mask that covered his whole head,  like a helmet. In the modern productions at York, they often show that someone is an angel or God by placing them on stilts or, perhaps, a ladder, with a robe that flows ten feet down to the ground, so the person looks very tall. “God” may have been perched on a half-story above the second stage.

The second story was Heaven, of course. A number of the stages required two levels or even three, so the wagons were built heavily on the bottom. There is one drawing of a pageant-wagon in 1615 that appears to show a wagon slung very low, so that the body hangs down below the axle. The space below could always be used for something: a place to catch falling water, or a place for concealed smoking pots to release steam and smoke of Hell. I don’t know how they kept the fires safe, but it seems certain that they did.

On the 2006 York wagon, they built two heavenly staircases going up to Heaven from the main stage platform. Everything on the stairs and in the upper story is painted white, silver, or gold. Underneath the stairs and the central high platform, everything is dark. That’s the lower region where the smoke of Hell can drift up from the space underneath.

Lucifer’s Fall is straightforward: he stands on the top platform, after God has created him and named him the chief angel, with another angel or two at his side. On the stairs, the other angels sing a Te Deum hymn, and they praise God in spoken verses too, but Lucifer preens and praises only himself. Here is the key passage, Lucifer speaking:

Ther sall I set myselfe, full semely to seyghte,
To ressayve my reverence thorowe righte o renowne.
I sall be lyke unto hym that es hyeste on heghte —
Owe, what I am derworth and defte.
Owe, Dewes, all goes downe!
My mighte and my mayne es all marrande.
Helpe, felawes, in faythe I am fallande.

“I shall be like unto Him that is highest in height—Oh, how I am worthy and noble!” And then suddenly, “Oh God, all goes down!” He literally tumbles off his platform to the darker lower stage, and at least one other angel goes with him, also lamenting.  The medieval wagon might have had a hole in the upper stage floor, possibly with a pole to slide down, possibly just for a stunt fall. Falling, as we know, is always good for slapstick comic effect, and the Devil was worth laughing at. Lucifer probably had a mask with two faces, light and dark. He and his angel/devil companion may have had a cloak that could be suddenly flipped white to black. The stage directions mark his last lines in “Inferno.”

The closing lines show God separating darkness from light, which is the opening line of Genesis. The dark night morally belongs to Hell, where “shall mirkness never be missing.” So that, says the play, is why God said Let there be Light. In this play, he doesn’t say it in quite those words, because he speaks in rhymed, alliterative verse. “This day’s work is entirely done, and it pleases me well, and I give it my blessing.”

This day warke es done ilke a dele,
And all this warke lykes me ryght wele,
And baynely I gyf it my blyssyng.

Since the English Mystery Play Cycles for Corpus Christi developed from processions, they were expected to go through the center of the town and stop by many of the churches, as the procession had done. The procession had celebrated a short Mass at each parish church, and the pageant wagons may have included this type of stop at first. But as the plays grew longer, they became the substitute for the procession, which was eventually scheduled for the following day. The stops were just for each wagon to put on its play.

In 1399, the pageant wagons had twelve stops. During the 1400s, more parish churches were included, up to seventeen stops. At each stop, the pageant wagon had to lock its wheels and perform its play, then move on a few blocks to the next.

The physical demands of the large wagons put some limitations on the route. Sharp corners were avoided, of course, though the wagons had some turning ability. It’s worth noting that for most city load-hauling, wagons were not used, just as we wouldn’t use an 18-wheeler to move things inside New York City. The medieval equivalent of a delivery van was the two-wheeled cart, often a platform with wicker walls to hold the load. Wagons were for special purposes, like moving the king’s household furniture from castle to castle. Carts could dodge potholes and back up easily; wagons lumbered along. But by the 14th century, at least the pivoting front axle could be counted on.

Large lumber had become extremely expensive by the time of the Corpus Christi processions. A large wagon with pivoting front axle, four or even six wheels, full-wooden sides and structure on top, and some special effects cranes or doors was a major investment. Sometimes, a guild that had contracted to provide a pageant wagon found that it could no longer afford the expense. Another guild, whose fortunes were on the ascent, took it over, and the fading guild was just assigned to support some other production with fees.

The pageant procession crossed the River Ouse into the city, through the gates of the old city wall and then around a square inside the walled Old City, choosing streets that were wide enough. At the beginning and end of the route, they needed a place for the pageant wagons to wait. Without Walmart parking lots, they used some Greens–open areas with grass–and some market squares, including one in York called The Pavement. (Clearly, it was named at the time when the expense of paving stones pounded into the dirt, to avoid rivers of mud in spring, was an extravagant investment.) A parish church, All Saints, was conveniently located on The Pavement to serve as the last stop. The circuit went from east to west, following the sun through the day, so at the eastern greens where wagons lined up at sunrise, it was convenient to have sheds to rent storage space during the rest of the year. To some extent, the play cycle prompted the type of transient and permanent structures needed by county fairs.

The Feast of Corpus Christi was a new event for the medieval church, established in 1264 and promoted with more enthusiasm during the 1300s. Its purpose was to celebrate and educate about the meaning of the Host and the doctrine of transubstantiation, in which the bread became the body of Jesus. But its main event was a procession through every town, carrying the Host so that everyone could see it. By this time, there were superstitions about the good luck that would accrue to anyone who saw the Host being lifted up, which is when the miracle occurred. To keep the Mass from being the playground for this superstition, the church just permitted everyone free viewing, once a year.

In a procession, the priests and everyone who held any sort of rank in the town formed a parade. By the 1300s, the craft guilds were highly developed. They were part of a town’s ordinary government; the term “mayor” indicated that the person was the leading guild leader that year, the “major” one. The guilds were all framed as religious organizations, in a time when it was normal to have church and state united. They had patron saints, so sometimes they had their own processions on their saint’s day.

In the Corpus Christi procession, these men carried banners, torches, and images of their patron saints. But they also made large images, probably just pictures on signboards at first, illustrating scenes from the story of Jesus—which, as we know, was considered to start with Adam. Over a period of time—and we have few records so we just have to guess—the guilds began to compete with each other for magnificence of display.

The next step was to pull a pageant that held a living tableau showing the Bible story in question. The “pageant” meant a stage on wheels, a specialized wagon. Sometimes pageants were exactly like floats in a modern parade, showing a castle, a mountain, or a ship. Fully-rigged ships on wheels were very popular, in fact. They also showed animals, exotic ones like elephants, lions, or dragons. But these types of floats were more appropriate for other civic occasions, such as inauguration of a Mayor, or the king’s visit to the town. For Corpus Christi, they stayed with the Bible’s stories alone (with one notable exception, later).

The stage was moving, but the scene shown on it, at first, was not. Medieval towns loved living tableaux because they were simpler than full plays with spoken lines, and they could be staged by children, too. In 1313, the King of England was welcomed to Paris with a series of living tableaux of Bible scenes. Eventually, in Paris at least, these living tableaux began to have some silent movement, the beginning of the Mime tradition. In England, silent tableaux eventually turned into the parlor game of Charades, but only after a long run of civic celebration, such as inaugurations and welcome feasts.

Thus far, the procession was like a Rose Bowl parade with “floats,” or a Macy’s Thanksgiving parade with giant balloons. But at some point next, a guild’s pageant wagon had actors giving short dramatic presentations for their stage of the story. The wagons may have kept moving, again like a Macy’s parade with moving figures. They may have saved their best moments for times when the procession paused, as it did at various churches on the route. It’s not hard to imagine that after one guild had a short play with speaking parts, they all felt challenged to up their game for the following year.

And so eventually the Corpus Christi celebration in northern England, in particular, came to be a cycle of Bible plays, each put on by a different guilt or fraternity, usually on wagons that moved through the town. There are several full scripts and some detailed wagon descriptions that have come to us through fire and flood. The fullest set is from York, but we also have texts and records from Chester and Wakefield. There’s even an intriguing set of play scripts that has an opening line about putting on this cycle in “N-Town,” where “N” stands for “Name.” It seems to be a script that’s available for a town to adopt, perhaps one that has accumulated the best ideas from various towns, or perhaps written by someone who thought he could improve on them all.

In the rest of Europe, Passion Plays developed as staged, stationary events, and they were often presented at other times of the year. I’ll write about those stages and plays as we go, but for now, the pageant wagons of York are calling.

The biggest development in European medieval theater begins with a free-thinking scholar questioning how bread can become the literal body of Christ. When Berengar of Tours was himself a student, he studied under a former student of Gerbert of Aurillac, who became Pope Sylvester II (see my linked archived article). Now the dean of the cathedral school at Chartres, Berengar was one of the most influential thinkers of his time. His questioning drew attention to a theological question that had never been fully pinned down before: just how is the bread the body of Jesus? Berengar guessed that it “was” both things at the same time in some sense, but not literally.

The subsequent letters and hearings devoted to judging Berengar’s orthodoxy led to the Church forming an official doctrine that the bread mystically and miraculously becomes the literal body of Christ at the moment when the priest raises it. The term “transubstantiation” first came into use not long after, around 1125. In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council determined that transubstantiation was the official doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church. In 1246, the Bishop of Liège began to have a regional feast day to celebrate the miracle of transubstantiation: the Feast of the Body of Christ, that is, Corpus Christi. In 1264, it became an official feast day of the entire Catholic Church. The idea was to form a procession through the town with an elevated Host — post-miracle — and allow everyone in the town to see it, for a blessing. They could also focus on education about the doctrine, to make sure everyone understood it. Even then, it wasn’t until 1317 that Popes really began to promote it.

During the 13th century, the church was also discouraging clergy from participating in plays outside the church. In 1210, the Pope had issued an edict forbidding them from going on a public secular stage. So over the course of the century between this edict and the promotion of Corpus Christi Day, the transition from church interior to church steps to public stage was complete.

The highlight of the Feast of Corpus Christi became the town’s Passion Play, a set of plays devoted to illustrating the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection, thus explaining the meaning of the Host. All over Europe, the tradition caught on. In Germany, by 1380, the play in Frankfort took plays over two days, it was so long. The plays grew more and more magnificent, so that by 1500, the Passion Play in Tyrol, Germany, it took seven days! It wasn’t enough to tell the story of Jesus’ life and death, so instead, the story began at the beginning of time, in Genesis.

I’m going to write in more detail, though, about the Corpus Christi plays in York, England. They’re interesting because they used stage wagons, and because they were a true civic project put on by the guilds. We have a lot of documentation, too. The guilds kept all sorts of records, so naturally historians have written all sorts of articles about aspects of the production.

There are two medieval Daniel plays, both dating from the mid-1100s. One was written by Hilarius, a pupil of Abelard (which seems worth mentioning). The second is more famous, and it probably was based on Hilarius’s play. This one was written by the choir school at Beauvais Cathedral. We know exactly who wrote it because the play begins by proclaiming the authorship! It’s possible that it was an advanced student assignment: to take the play by Hilarius and improve on it, showing off their ability to work with music and Latin meter.

This play is no longer just a few characters in simple settings. It presents nineteen scenes and a full cast (two kings, a queen, royal counselors, soldiers, angels, plus both Daniel and Habakkuk)  with extras: singers, musicians, waiters, members of processions. All were to be costumed for the Babylonian court. The musicians specifically include harps, drums, and zithers, and there may have been others. There’s a sunken lion’s den with some provision for “lions.” Furthermore, the stage notes stipulate for the prophet Habakkuk to arrive at the lions’ den not walking, but flying. Ropes, pulleys, a wire? later medieval stages were equal to all of these tricks.

You can see modern revivals of “The Play of Daniel” on YouTube. It was first premiered in our time at the Met in 1958, using the Chapel at “The Cloisters” as the setting. The Met staged it again 50 years later, and some scenes from this version are posted on YouTube. I’m linking here to Balshazzar’s Feast and Daniel Interpreting the Writing.  Additionally, the University of Oklahoma has posted their full production.

The Medieval French Drama. Grace Frank. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960.

The New Oxford History of Music: The Early Middle Ages to 1300. Richard Crocker, David Hiley.

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.

Adam de la Halle is the other famous name from early Arras, France theater. He was an educated man who composed both poetry and music; Adam is also called le Bossu, which does not mean “boss” in Japanese, it means “hunchback,” but nobody thinks he actually was deformed, so go figure. He’s known for two plays, which seems little compared to later writers, but to have gotten anything down on paper, and persisting through the vicissitudes of time to the present day, signals real importance. Adam’s life seems to have run between about 1240 and 1285; he lived and worked in Arras until, later, he went to the court of Charles of Anjou, a French prince who had become King of Sicily, ruling from Naples. He may have accompanied Charles on his Crusade.

So we know he left Arras eventually, but ironically, his most famous work “Le Jeu de la Feuillée” poses the question: will he leave Arras tonight? It turns out that he does not. It’s an interesting composition because its form is unusual, as is its “plot.” The year was 1262, and the event was the Confrèrie des Jongleurs et Bourgeois annual banquet. The play takes place inside the banquet, and it seems most likely that it was a series of sketches put on during the actual banquet itself, perhaps one per hour, as the night passed in eating and drinking. The banquet lasted most of the night, and the sketches end with “morning” dawning.

During the sketches, Adam de la Halle appears as the protagonist, probably Adam himself acting the role. He is in his room, telling his family and friends that he is now leaving Arras to study in Paris. Each sketch is a different set of persuasions not to leave: his father, a harlot, a monk, a fool, and a doctor all try to persuade him not to leave. At midnight, three fairies arrive for the banquet (people may have come and gone during the night, so the fairies may have just showed up at the door like anyone else). What did they look like—men or women? We think of Disney, but probably not so much.

Three fairies at a banquet are always trouble. These fairies notice that their places have not been set correctly; something, a spoon perhaps, is missing. One of them vows that in retribution, Adam de la Halle will be cursed with an inability to leave Arras! And so it proves: by the last sketch, everyone is tired and drunk, and Adam de le Halle has not left his room. Church bells ring, and they all go home. If Jelle Koopmans is correct (he formed the hypothesis that it was a set of sketches within the real banquet), the audience was also tired and a bit drunk, and ready to go home.

Adam’s other well-known work “Le Jeu de Robin et Marion” is actually musical theater, with the 13th-century-notation music still preserved. It’s a play about Robert the Shepherd and his girl Marion, who is courted by a gentleman out hunting but remains true to the shepherd. The play appears to be the fleshing-out of an old song, “Robin m’aime, Robin m’a.” Of course, the music has been reconstructed and recorded. Here you can enjoy (audio only) the full production, presented by Ensemble Micrologus, an Italian group. They once staged it with costumes, but there’s no video on YouTube. Here, you can see the musicians playing and slightly acting a scene: Robin et Marion. Here, you can read an English translation of the play!

footnote: Jelle Koopmans’s essay, “Arras, Where Jongleurs Meet, Play, and Develop Forms Aftewards Seen as Theatre,” appears in The Routledge Research Companion to Early Drama and Performance (2016).